If you don't care about house prices, you may as well click the back button now. If you do, then you probably follow some of the plethora of indices that are published each month.

When I first started working as a financial journalist, way back in the late 1990s, just a handful of organisations published monthly reports on the state of the property market; now, rarely a day goes by without someone trying to tell us something about house prices, activity, buyer sentiment, seller sentiment and so on. This week alone, Hometrack has told us that prices were up 0.1% in April, Nationwide told us they were down 0.2% over the same period, and Land Registry told us prices dropped by 0.6% in March. That's a lot of house prices.

I asked a couple of economists which indices they rated. David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee and now an economics professor in the US, said it was "hard to choose between them" and noted "there are major issues with all the house price indices as they don't do well when these markets are thinly traded – so a change in the mix sold has a major impact on the price."

Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight, said: "House prices can be hugely volatile from survey to survey and from month to month. Therefore, I consider it unwise to put too much emphasis on a particular measure or monthly figure – but I probably pay most attention to the indices produced by the Halifax and the Nationwide.

"I pay least attention to those that use asking prices rather than the actual prices agreed."

We've looked behind the headlines to explain how each house price index works, which will hopefully make it easier for you to decide which you want to be guided by. We'd love to hear which ones you think are worthwhile and which you take with a pinch of salt.